While
every student from every architecture school probably thinks that each
year they is deserving of a book that sums up the projects, lectures,
exhibitions, events, seminars, publications, and other happenings, not
that many schools are able to make it happen. In particular a few Ivy
League schools come to mind: Columbia GSAPP's Abstract, Yale SOA's Retrospecta, and Harvard GSD's Platform (the successor to Studio Works).
The latter is especially significant given its size (nearly 400 pages),
its international distribution through publisher Actar, and the amount
of material inside. A prospective student would no doubt be overwhelmed
by the sheer amount of stuff happening at the Graduate School of Design
as evidenced by the projects, transcripts, and personalities throughout.

Harvard
GSD is not unique in needing to find an adequate book structure and
graphic design to make sense of the multitudes of output. GSAPP's
publications in recent years have been handled by star designer Stefan
Sagmeister, who tends for bold statements like holes or an empty box.
But Harvard opts for a simple approach that delineates the different
work performed through subtle changes in color and graphic treatment.
Gray pages signal lectures and publications, for example, and the color
blue signals historical content. Unique moments happen with the essays
that are printed on slightly smaller and lighter-weight green pages
(spread above). The various types of output are interspersed to make the
book most suitable for browsing; that is about the only way to go about
it, since the book lacks a table of contents (it does have an index,
though).

As a visually rich feast for browsing, Platform 6
does a great job of giving people a taste of what Harvard GSD is all
about, at least within a particular school year. Yet for those looking
to dig deeper they have to venture elsewhere. Tod Williams and Billie
Tsien's Senior Loeb Scholar Lecture must have yielded plenty of valuable
insight, but all we are treated to is a photo of Billie opposite four
short quotes from the talk. This is one example of how the book covers
just about everything that happened throughout the year without giving
the reader more than just a taste. Only the green inserts really give
the reader something substantial, and there are only four of them. Well,
five actually, but the last one is by editor Rosetta Elkin on the
complications of compiling one year of pedagogy into one volume!

Elkin's
essay does elucidate some of the intent of how the book was structured
and designed, but the page-to-page juxtapositions are quite subtle: Toyo
Ito referencing metabolism on one page followed by "an architecture
thesis that questions the autonomy of the urban dwelling" on the next
followed by an urban planning project in Burkina Faso that proposes
modular housing after that. Perhaps these relationships are a "tool for
revealing emergent patterns that operate across public event, individual
thesis, and global narrative," but I would not use the word "powerful"
as Elkin does to describe it. Nevertheless, Elkin's words do point to
the rewards that come with close reading of the school's consistently
high-quality output documented in these pages.